PARTICIPANTS

Mark Juergensmeyer
UCSB Global & International Studies

Mark Juergensmeyer is Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and a dozen books.

His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States, and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. A previous book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press, 1993) covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. It was named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has recently been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, Updated Edition, 2005), and was selected as Community Book of the Year at the University of California, Davis.

His most recent work is an edited volume, Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2003), and he is working on a book on religion and war, and an edited volume on religion in global civil society.

Juergensmeyer has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the 2003 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and is the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Lehigh University in 2004. Since the events of September 11, 2001, he has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News, ABC's Politically Incorrect, and CNBC's Dennis Miller Show.

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Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?

We’ve received an interesting range of responses to the question, “What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?  The diversity and the thoughtfulness of the responses affirm that we have posed this question to the right people, and that our conversation will be diverse and thoughtful as well.

On one level, many of the responses deal with issues of freedom—both freedom of religion and freedom from religion. In some cases, religious groups are repressed and religious customs and practices are limited, raising issues of human rights and the freedom of religious expression. In other cases it is the religion of a dominant culture that is repressive. Dominant religions can trivialize and control other religious traditions, and they can limit the kind of services and information that international humanitarian organizations might want to provide, especially in areas of personal health and family planning.

These difficulties point to a larger issue, to which many of the responses also allude: the role that religion plays in the encounters among differing cultural perceptions. When worldviews collide, religion is often part of the clash of perceptions. Though the assumptions of modern urban Western NGO personnel may not appear to be explicitly religious, they may be perceived as being either covertly Christian or Jewish, or seen as part of a secular project to diminish the role of religion in public life. Thus our own perspectives might be part of the dynamics of a cultural encounter that on some level is seen to be one that carries religious freight.

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